ChocolateHeaven

Eve retrospective: Jovian go boom (part 2)

A quick tl;dr recap, since its been a while: A Jovian named Misu Baniya was mucking about and ended up exploding himself all over the galaxy into pilots’ hangars.

Thanks to the Jove being gigantic veiny-headed science nerds, they determined that unlike his nursery rhyme compadre, Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s spaceships and all the king’s spud-faced mutants could put him back together again. Thus began the great body part harvest by representatives of the four races. Each were eager to earn favour from said spud-faced nerds, hoping for riches, technology and glory for their empire. Rawr!

And so we begin (or should that be continue?)…

Rounding up of parts began in earnest. Some beginning before there was any kind of announcement to do with Baniya’s reconstruction. For a while, collecting the parts was a simple task. A lot of pilots were young and naïve in those days and readily gave up their parts… Until they realised the parts may have value, of course.

Then began the brokering. Parts were exchanged for isk, for ships and modules, for promises of shares in whatever reward was forthcoming, and even for other body parts.

Since each represented faction was to collect a different body part, it made no sense to hold on to a Cerebral Slice if you were Minmatar and your Gallente buddies had some Bone Splinters just taking up space on the mantelpiece. So trades were not uncommon, though naturally for New Eden, each party would attempt to broker a better deal for themselves.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you would find old rivalries cropping up. For example, the Caldari – who were by far and away the most organised in this effort – which subsequently secured their victory – would purposefully horde Cerebral Slices (Gallente), unless they could trade for Liver Bile (Caldari) at a ratio greatly in their favour.

Omir Sarikusa: Do not piss in his cheerios!

And then there were the Blood Raiders, who also managed to secure a large collection of body parts – with particular focus Blood Drops, which makes sense really. Subsequently – for a time – The Bleak Lands were beset by capsuleers, descending upon the cultists like a nest of angry hornets. This lasted for a while until their beloved leader, Omir Sarikusa, proclaimed that the Blood Raiders had completed their collection. Whether this, or the overwhelming influx of capsuleers was the reason for their stopping we shall unlikely ever know.

Intergalactic body part amnesty day

Initially, the Empires were buying back the body parts through the open market. This soon took a downward turn as those ‘trusty’ scammers got in on the act and started to cause their usual hullabaloo.

An alternative was quickly instated. A particular day was set aside where all ‘batches’ of parts could be returned to a commissioner from your race. These were NPCs played by the then-active AURORA division of ISD (live events team, basically), and you could trade the parts with them throughout the day. As an incentive, 20mil isk was handed out for each complete batch.

An extra reward was implied from the start for those that donated full batches, but no word on what the reward was was forthcoming, only that the overall ‘winner’ of the collection would gain great favour from the Jove.

The batch-prize was BPCs of a prototype cloaking device, something that until that point was not available in-game. The more batches donated, the more runs you would have on your BPC/s. Each of the cloaking devices initially sold for 120-150mil, and stabilised at 100mil after a day or two. This was however, a massive amount of isk in the days before faction/officer mods and lvl4 missions.

What happened to the other collectors’ stash I have no idea, but personally I made a lot of donators very happily invisible.

Aww, all better

Upon revival, Baniya began his visits anew, but in addition to visiting heads of state, he visited heads of capsuleer alliances, much to the frustration and annoyance of the official government bodies:

If they’re trying to make a point, I don’t know what it is. Sure, since the ISD came about the eggers have spread all over the place, but putting those ‘societies’ of theirs up there in lawless space on the same pedestal as us? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Jovians were deliberately trying to undermine the rich history and traditions of our civilizations. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that’s not what they’re trying to do. – anonymous Federation statesman

According to public records, Baniya visited the following deep-space alliances:

All of these entities were added to the Jovian Register of Sovereign Nation-states, to the further annoyance of politicians from the four CONCORD-sanctioned nation-states.

There is no society, no populace to speak of, no national customs, no real history, no common origin, no language. How, then, can these alliances be thought of as nations? What possible permutation of the definition can give rise to an initiative such as this? – Federation Senator Traude Bonailles